vale david bowie
strangely i'm about two hundred pages into the huge novel called limit where the main characters are travelling on the maiden voyage of the space elevator and they are about to meet a guest with different coloured eyes who is going to sing for them. the characters name get's mentioned about 10 pages later but by then it's obvious whom frank schatzing is writing about. 
there's a conversation where the inventor of the elevator and bowie are chatting and bowie reveals he's in his 90's only to be told, 'you look remarkably young.'
i read that this morning, and about seven hours later some one text-ed me bowie has died. 
i checked with duncan bowie's feed and it was legit. 

it's impossible for me not to shed tears, i can't even begin to write how much bowie meant to me and about a million other london kids growing up in the 70's. i must have been around 12 when i saw him on TOTP's preforming starman in glitter suit and with a star on his forehead. He leaned into the camera and thus my room, and said, 'i had to phone someone so i picked on you.'
from that moment my life changed.
pin ups, ziggy, aladin sane, i was getting my hands on everything.
i vividly recall getting diamond dogs and playing it in my room over and over until my parents went nuts, the vinyl wore down the needle, i knew the words inside out, candidate, sweet thing, candidate reprise, that whole epic was so amazingly cool, i went out and read 1984 straight away, i read burroughs and it was like education really began for me, my education. not some curriculum the government rams down your neck at the sausage factory, this was me hungry to learn everything i possibly could about this world bowie inhabited. it was my world now. 
bowie wrote our lives, he did. ask any london kid my age. without him in the world it's like our soundtracks just stop. thankfully i have an equal love of kilbey's music so let's hope he keeps knocking out the classics but with bowie i guess he came back, back from the dead. and then he died. it's stumped us all.
he gave us 'the next day' a retrospective mish mash of his past glories completely reborn into brand new songs that sounded fresh and brilliant, only the discerning listener would know what he had done, it was as though he had never gone away. and then blackstar. which now takes on a different light in the knowledge he knew he was going to die whereas we didn't have a clue. the lyrics all begin to take shape, reassembled in light of this dark truth.
i don't know what to say, i love bowie. i dragged my pregnant wife to see him twice over two continents, she wasn't such a fan but i wasn't thinking of her, no child of mine will miss out on the experience of bowie live, the thin layer of skin was exposed to many influences and the developing embryo evolved into a highly intelligent, beautiful member of the human race. 
i saw bowie play many times in many guises, and i saw the final sydney show, right in the front row. amazing. i took jaci my lesbian friend along and we screamed like teenagers and cried when he played fantastic voyage. 
but with his final album i believe he completely redefined himself yet again. not just lyrically and musically but also as a statement on the three most important aspects of humanity. art, life and death. 
i'm really sad, sad for him, his family and my selfish self because i want more yet i'm happy he died at peace and with the people he loved, and i'm happy that he came back one last time and surprised us all. lazarus indeed.
there's never going to be another individual like bowie again.
although i'm deeply emotional about this, i'm also very aware when you die it's not the end, you just transition to a different frequency. so david, i'm tuning in. god bless you.